Transcription

1 陈劭雄 CHEN SHAOXIONG t i m e z o n e 8 Boers-Li Gallery

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5 陈劭雄 CHEN SHAOXIONG t i m e z o n e 8 Boers-Li Gallery

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7 陈劭雄 : 从便携式的街景到私人外交 Chen Shaoxiong, From Portable Streets to Private Diplomacy Hou Hanru

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9 如何观察事物?

10 How to Look at Things? How to look at things around us and make sense of them is the most basic question that we try to figure out everyday. In other words, perception of the world is the central activity of our very existence. But the answers are by no means self-evident. Instead, our perceptions vary, evolve and mutate considerably according to different contexts, from physical to cultural, from social to political. In fact, this process of varying, evolving and mutating constitutes the very core content and driving dynamic of the history of human civilization, and impacts everything in our lives. Visual art is no doubt the most direct and efficient territory to explore and experiment with different modes of perception and representation. Interactions between artists and their surroundings, between their individual or collective visions, imaginations and intellectual interrogations, and the constantly changing social realities are the most decisive conditions for the makings of modes of perception and representation, namely, modes of cultural production at large. The Chinese contemporary art scene, as one of the most vibrant centers of global art, against its particular background of economic, cultural and social developments, has also generated some of the most significant experiments with issues of perception and representation. Chen Shaoxiong, born in 1962 in Shantou, Guangdong, and living and working mainly in Guangzhou, China s southern gate towards the world, is certainly one of the most inventive and influential figures in the field. In fact, contemporary Chinese society, culture and their artistic expressions are highly complex and diversified. Complexity and diversity are exactly what make today s China so dynamic, powerful; so full of excitement and, equally meaningful, contradiction. The immensity of the country s territory and the geographic, historic and cultural differences therein are so obvious and intense that the notions of nation-state and identity are infinitely challenged and reinvented. It s further intensified by the dramatic debates over and implementations of the modernization project that intends, ultimately, to make China a new powerhouse in today s globalization. Almost all regions and main cities have produced their own cultural characteristics, languages (dialects and langage) and lifestyles that, inevitably, in the process of integration into both the national movement of modernization and globalization actively embracing influences from the outside world and radically change the Chinese way of living have also generated some highly interesting hybridities Chen Shaoxiong lives and works mainly in the Pearl River Delta area encompassing the rapidly modernizing regions of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Zhuhai and Macau. This is China s most alternative region, the main laboratory of economic, cultural, social and even political openness. Thanks to the openness of individual and social mindsets and relatively liberated social control, people in the region can enjoy more freedom and have developed particular capacities to imagine, envision and execute inventive forms of everyday life and social communication, hence social structures based on multi-directional and multicultural principles that shrewdly escape from the dominance of the official ideological, political and social systems of control. This is particularly evident in the making of the new urbanscape and visual cultures prompted by the unprecedented speed and scale of urbanization of the region that has now turned it into an endless city-region, a kind of immense collage of multiple forms of urban typologies and populations from different origins. This renders the region an extremely exciting locality for all kinds of experiments in terms of economic, social and cultural innovations. What is particularly important to notice is that the main energy for such innovation comes mostly from bottom-up social claims that, through DIY initiatives and anticipations, are able to force the top-down power system to adapt to real change! In contrast to the early Chinese avant-garde art movement from the end of the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s in political centers like Beijing rooted in direct confrontation with and revolt against the official ideological and visual paradigms and institutions, experimental art from Guangzhou and the PRD region have been oriented towards non-confrontational proposals aimed at opening up a new horizon of change beyond the established models of struggle. The artistic production generated within the region largely reflects the more democratic categorization of things and social hierarchy that prevail in the region. Pleasant co-existence of high and low, intellectual and pop culture, between official propaganda and popular media, between formal and informal economics, and so on, are often optimistic and full of humor, and consistently critical without falling into political

11 便携的街景

12 clichés. Ultimately, they embrace diversity and change without any intellectual presumptions. All of these factors have allowed artists to become the most liberated and willing to transgress any established boundaries of cultural and political systems. They are by nature utopian, playful, humorous, and even ironic, with a strong sense of pragmatics. In the early 1990s, Chen Shaoxiong and his friends Lin Yilin and Liang Juhui founded the first influential artist group in the region named, curiously, Big Tail Elephant Working Group. The group was joined by Xu Tan a short time later. For almost a whole decade, the group, operating as an intelligent and efficient dialectical formation between collective dynamics and respect for individual characteristics, managed to self-organize and realize some of the most original and critical interventions into the process of China s urban expansion. Like urban guerrillas, they invaded typical sites of urban development such as construction sites, half-finished buildings and expanding streets to realize their often ephemeral performances, installations and exhibitions. More radical than the Situationist dérive, they occupy new urban sectors, interrupt the normal process of construction and turn them into veritable temporary autonomous zones (T.A.Z. à la Hakim Bey). Those T.A.Z.s open up unusual and uncontrolled spaces for urban experimentation from physical, bodily experiences to public debates on social topics. Hence, some of their most historic works of art were produced. Today these works are seen as landmarks of Chinese and international art histories of the period. The group, having inspired a whole generation of artists from the region and beyond in the 1990s, has decisively influenced the evolution of contemporary art s engagement with urbanization an increasingly significant aspect of today s global contemporary art scene. Chen Shaoxiong s artistic achievement and contribution to the group are personally meaningful. Different from Lin Yilin s persisting interests in the relation between the body and the urban space, Xu Tan s focus on the power relationship between Chinese urban development and global politics and Liang Juhui s inquiries into the social impact of urban density, Chen Shaoxiong immerses himself in a more distant but somehow more intellectually engaging question perception, or the particular impacts of drastic urban change on our perceptive faculties. After his first series of performances and installations exploring the relationship between urban energy consumption and bodily resistance, he presented a series of video installations in the form of perceptive devices that demonstrate efforts to negotiate with the improbable balance between fundamentally precarious, contradictory elements of our perceptive faculties and their objects, notably the rapidly changing urban scene. His installations refer to some major figures in art history Seesaw (1994), an installation with a gun potentially triggered by a seesaw balanced between two monitors showing seascapes, and Change the TV Channel, Change the Bride s Decision (1994), a robot dressed in a bridal gown with a head made of a TV set with a live broadcast, are obviously inspired by Marcel Duchamp s Large Glass and visual and linguistic puns. Chen Shaoxiong s series Sight Adjusters ( ), in the form of binoculars, invites the audience to experience the impossibility of perfect reproduction of reality through perceptive devices and negotiates with the contradictory constraints of the impossibility and the pleasure of desiring for perfection. This furthers the tradition of extending visual art through scientific and technological research (seen in Albert Dürer s famous woodcuts of perspective research and other Renaissance works) to confront the contemporary scenarios of urban mutation that are much more dramatic, radical and exciting. They function as devices to demonstrate the ever-changing and uncertain relationships between the beholder and the speedily transforming urban world outside. The speed of change of this urban world is so fast that any attempt to grasp it in a static way is doomed to fail. The images behind the TV screens and the two lenses of the binoculars are always changing, shifting between totally disconnected and arbitrarily bridged scenes that constantly alter and restructure the meanings of the objects and scenes. The beholders are forced to look in to the lenses in voyeuristic positions. What they get are not only perverse pleasures but also puzzling questions about the reliability of their perceptions of the real world. This is exactly how urban change in Chinese cities can impact our intellects and ways of living. It s a radically mutating and intriguing new world. One should learn how to deal with it inventively just like the bride should make her decision of whom to marry at the last moment while watching the TV channel shifting! Portable Streets Chen Shaoxiong is fascinated by urban change. However, different from many others who are stunned by the booming high rise concrete urban forests hundreds of skyscrapers that appear on mainstream media and official socialist and capitalist propagandas symbolizing the success of the dominant powers he is more attracted by the low-life on street level. He understands that urbanization does not only signify hardware constructions. More importantly, it involves the social transformation process of generating a truly urban and civil society the rise of a new urbanized citizen class, immigration from rural areas, and introduction of consumer society. The formation of social, economic and political systems, as well as new modes of visual and linguistic communication

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14 and corresponding cultural values, is a key step towards integration into the network of global cities. And the street is the most immediate and ideal location to encounter and grasp such a process. As an artist attracted by the change of his time, Chen Shaoxiong decides to focus his artistic endeavors to record life at street-level. However, he is not interested in utilizing highly sophisticated cameras and processing techniques offered by modern photography. Instead, He resorts to the most convenient instrument of recording to create his work. He chooses to use simple, cheap, reactive compact cameras to literally shoot whatever he sees on the street: all kinds of people, objects and signs. At the same time, he is not particularly interested in producing carefully organized urban archives. He simply captures and displays whatever runs into the lens. There is a kind of amateurism in his work. It shows the very fragility of photography as a mature, over-established mode of representation and the necessity to abandon and deconstruct this mode in order to catch up with the pace of change in the contemporary visual environment. The outcome is often funny, uncanny and uncomfortably challenging. This is a conscious decision. He states that, living in and looking at his home city of Guangzhou, he finds himself like a tourist who constantly discovers new faces and new things at every moment. He is deeply attracted by the ephemeral surprises caused by the incessant changes of the cityscape and its people. In order not to miss any of them, he opts to rely on the decision of the camera s shutter to include everything by pumping it all into the lens. Photos are like theatre, still shots of the extremely complicated theatre of human life. To recollect those interesting process, I invented a method of photo-collage. Its specialty is that its picture can be infinitely extended, and its time volume is exactly the scope that I need to watch this immense theatre of human life. Due to respect for every individual, everyone in the theatre is considered a protagonist. The concrete method is that I photograph every person, every street sign, every car, every tiny object such as a trash bin, and print them out according to the proportions of their sizes. Then the images are cut out and transformed into three dimensional cardboards to reconstruct street views at my home. This photo-narrative like a miniature kingdom is what tells my understandings of representations of real life situations. 1 Clearly, assuming himself to be a permanent tourist living in his home city reveals a very important aspect that decisively changes the nature of contemporary cities from mutually separated localities with fixed characteristics to more generic, mutually connected and influenced globalised urban sites that take mobility, in both external and internal directions, as the core driving force of change. People not only observe and enjoy cultural differences when they are travelling to other cities. They are also witnessing, participating and consuming new differences in their own localities generated by the process of urban change impacted by globalization. Sitting at home is no longer an experience of being home. Instead, it s more and more the adventure of traveling to an unknown place. As Boris Groys eloquently depicts: The times in which we live are thus an era of post-romantic, that is comfortable and total, tourism; marking a new phase in the history of the relations between the urban ou-topos and the world s topography Cities are no longer waiting for the arrival of the tourist they too are starting to join global circulation, to reproduce themselves on a world scale and to expand in all directions. As they do so, their movement and proliferation are happening at a much faster pace than the individual romantic tourist was ever capable of. This fact prompts the widespread outcry that all cities now increasingly resemble one another and are beginning to homogenize, with the result that when a tourist arrives in a new city he ends up seeing the same things he encountered in all the other cities. The experience of similarity among all contemporary cities often misleads the observer to assume that the globalization process is erasing local cultural idiosyncrasies, identities, and differences. The truth is not that these distinctions have disappeared, but that they in turn have also embarked on a journey, started to reproduce themselves to expand. 2 In 1997, Chen Shaoxiong made his first 3-D photocollage street view piece titled The Street Dropped from the Sky, a portable box containing three levels of images forming a street. Since then, he has produced a large number of similar works. Often, they are combinations of images collected from different cities, and resettled against the new backgrounds of the different cities to which the artist travels. Boris Groys points out: But above all, it is today s artists and intellectuals who are spending most of their time in transit Today the utopian impulse has shifted direction acknowledgment is no longer sought in time, but in space: Globalization has replaced the future as the site of utopia. So, rather than practicing avant-garde politics based on the future, we now embrace the politics of travel, migration, and nomadic life, paradoxically rekindling the utopian dimension that had ostensibly died out in the era of romantic tourism. 3 This is a new condition of artistic and cultural production today. And Chen Shaoxiong s photo-collage street view series, with tens of variations that connect them to different local contexts around the world, do not only reflect such a qualitative change of the nature of artistic production and definition of the profession; they also actively contribute to the mutation itself. Finally, they embody a new type of

15 躲避飞机的高层建筑

16 utopia, one that is conceptualized and unfolding in the dimension of contemporary urban space. They are dropped from the sky and now brought around the world, like the new street itself! The amateurism and portability implied in Chen Shaoxiong s street view photo-collages are an appropriate choice. They reveal that the artist is paying much more attention to how new modes of visual communication produced by mass media influence today s artistic imagination and procedure rather than any static mode of High Art. His interest in photography is primarily in its capacities for reproduction, distribution and circulation, the very dimensions of mass media inscribed in the collective memory of society. This logically incites him to become aware of the fact that, in the age of YouTube, digital moving images are becoming an increasingly essential form of up-to-the-minute representation and communication. This not only allows everyone to develop one s own potential to become an artist, but also encourages the breakdown of the established, modernist ideology and hierarchy in terms of art media. Now, all forms of expressions and media can become a tool of mass communication without having to fall back to the progressionist conception of new and old media. It s exactly in this context that we can understand the newest developments in Chen Shaoxiong s work, along with quite a number of Chinese artists, namely, resorting to animation ink painting videos. Since 2005, Chen Shaoxiong has realized a series of ink painting animation videos shown in various versions of installations. Ink City (2005), Ink Diary (2006) and The Days (2007) are diary-style records of the artist s everyday trajectories across his home city and his meetings with friends and family members. Combining video animation, the newly discovered medium of TV commercials and internet cultures, and ink painting, a specifically Chinese art language, to depict city life shows a highly conscious decision to search for relevance in confronting new forms of urban culture no longer founded on historic and geographic difference, but rather upon the dynamism that continuously generates new differences and hybridities in the competitive process to become more and more generic and global. The new visual culture now intentionally encompasses all kinds of influences and elements, ranging from the most experimental to the most conservative, from the past to the future, while the original hierarchies among them are totally eradicated. Hybridity is the key. It is the usage of this multi-media hybrid that renders Chen Shaoxiong s seemingly simple and easy-going scenes of everyday memories painted in a realistic style with ink extraordinary. The randomness of the fragmented recollections of memorized, unconnected and illogical moments in everyday life, or as the artist insists, the withdraw[al] of the (logical or linear) narrative 4, generates a particularly beautiful rhythm that absorbs the audience into a swift, hallucinating swirl of sentiment that zooms in and out of the amazing urban world. Here, a kind of familiar and intimate communication between the art work and the audience is gradually shaped and installed. The artist states: Ink City has translated photographs shot during two years into ink paintings and then condensed them into a video of three minutes. The objective recording of the photographs have been transformed by hand painting. This process rationalized all those that are missed, differed and forgotten. Both the ephemera of photography (fragments of reality) and the narrative structure of video (segmental process of reality) have considerably reduced my pain of struggling with the paradox. 5 And this presents a way to solve the fundamental existential paradox in the contemporary, globalised urban world. High Rises that Dodge Airplanes Chen Shaoxiong s inquiries and questions of perception regarding the changing urbanscape extend beyond simple fascinations with the physical spectacle of movement and change. He understands perfectly that the current urban mutation towards a newly globalised world implies and expresses all kinds of economic, cultural, social and political shifts that intensively restructure the real world we are all living in. Along with the booms of high rise buildings, freeways and neon signs that turn our new cities into theatrical spectacles, urban spaces are also being turned into testing grounds for new economic, social and political relationships and structures. Through competition and struggle for domination in the process of global restructuring, these testing grounds are transformed in turn into veritable battlefields of geopolitical conflicts between different nations, cultures and political organizations. Cities, especially cosmopolitan ones, are more and more exposed to the fate of becoming involved with new forms of geopolitical conflicts and wars, including both formal and informal acts of violence. What is interesting is that we tend to call those informal acts of violence, often driven by bottom-up claims of the oppressed for equality and power, terrorism. No city in the world can escape from such an entanglement. Cities are now, indeed, sites for global conflicts and negotiations. Thus, perceptions of the exciting new urban spectacle also signify confrontations with and considerations of the complexity of current social and geopolitical conditions. In some specific historic contexts, these conditions can become highly radical and even extreme. 9/11 is doubtless the most infamous example. In addition to the fatal violence and destruction that the event brought to urban life, it also suggested an irreversible,

17 公众参与

18 globalised change of direction in urban development every city in the world, as a part of the network of global cities in the age of global wars, is now forced to consider this kind of violent conflict. And we should be ready to live with it, and, especially, learn from it, in terms of how to understand this tendency as an expression of deeper social, political, economic and cultural collisions between diverse groups of populations. Coming from various and often endlessly complicated historic backgrounds, these groups are struggling for the rights to both live in and dominate the present and the future of the world. Unfortunately, coexistence of these diverse and often mutually opposing groups is a highly difficult and endless game of quarrels and fights. Chen Shaoxiong, like many other artists, is absolutely sensitive to such a tendency. In fact, his everyday life has already been directly and indirectly affected by this new global climate terrorism is a regular topic in the media and urban conversation. And this has almost naturally become a source of inspiration when he looks into further developing his research and exploration of new urban life. In an interview, he states: 9/11 is very close to me. It s only 2 or 3 meters away, the distance between me and the TV set when I watch TV. This is how it is as an image. But as reality (if reality really exists and appears the same as the image on the TV), the distance between me and the event of 9/11 is the same as the one between my hometown of Guangzhou and New York where the event took place. So 9/11 is for me very close at some times and very far away other times. 6 Then he came up with the most spectacular, amusing, and pungently ironic video installation piece Anti- Terrorism Variety for the 2003 Venice Biennial (Z.O.U: Zone of Urgency) that proposed to turn some of the most famous new landmark buildings in China (the City Hall of Guangzhou, the Eastern Pearl TV Tower of Shanghai, etc.) into a new form of anti-terrorism architecture that could bend their bodies to defend against or counter-attack the planes hijacked by terrorists in 9/11. Following this, a whole series of installations, paintings and objects including Anti-Terrorism Chess, BBS: If They Are Coming and Zippo, were created. The innovative design of the flexible high-rise buildings were inspired by some uncanny situations and behaviors of people facing violent events such as terrorist attacks, and, according to the artist, could dodge aircraft in all sorts of different ways, without damaging airplanes carrying innocent passengers. This is the most perfect idea I could come up with to prevent and fight terrorism. For the present, no architects are able to construct such a building. I hope however, that someday they will acquire this capacity. 7 With this purely unrealistic and utopian scenario, Chen Shaoxiong is by no means proposing a useful or effective solution to fight against terrorism and other violence in a time of generalized geopolitical and urban conflict. Instead, he solicits us to watch and re-examine this kind of fictive, surrealistic and humorous scenario from another perspective in order to question, on the one hand, the reliability and realness of the images related to the spectacle of violence, and on the other, the very reasons and mechanisms that provoke this kind of events, namely the clash of civilizations, that define the unsolvable struggles between the global powers and the dominated. As a classic solution to or ending of tragedies, the artist proposes that we resort to black humor: Whether in reconstructing major international political/media events or in dealing with tragedies of personal life, it s equally important to have a sense of humor. In many cases, a sense of humor shows another possibility implied in reality. Or it can create a dream that is closer to the will. This kind of dream can render some inevitable situations in reality ambiguous and distant. Every person needs sense of humor. The state also needs it. 8 At the end, Chen Shaoxiong says: My dream is: politicians can make politics artistically instead of politicized art. And, art is about providing one more choice, one more possibility. When unquestionable events become unbelievable, art can prove the believability and reliability of those unbelievable ideas. 9 Public Participation Dealing with the hot topic of terrorism is inevitably a political engagement. More precisely, Chen Shaoxiong s recent work focuses increasingly on the question of the political significance and function of urban space and architecture, especially their effects on the construction of social relationships. The city is a public space in permanent evolution. It is an infinite process of mutual influences flowing between its inhabitants and its physical formation. Urban politics is the outcome of such an interaction. Chen Shaoxiong s inquiry into the representation and effects of events of urban violence is a logical step in bringing him further towards questioning the collective memory of and participation in the changes of urban forms and conditions. In particular, he emphasizes the necessity of involving public participation in the next stage of his work. After the series Anti-Terrorism Variety, he produced two sets of painting installations that were open to public intervention. Referring to the popular tool of online exchanges among users, he named the series BBS: If They Are Coming. The works display scenes of hypothetical terrorist attacks, military conflicts and occupations of the cities where the works were presented (Guangzhou and Tirana, etc.) and asks the public to partake in its completion by using stickers to answer a set

19 私人外交

20 of questions about strategies and methods to be adopted to accomplish the terrorist attack missions. The scenarios imagined by the artist are clearly borrowed from recent events of urban terrorist attacks and military actions happening in geopolitical hot spots such as Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan, etc. Their displacement and grafting onto the peaceful cities of Guangzhou and Tirana in which the public see the works are so unlikely that they are rendered totally fictive and funny. The tension between the actual violence of the events, the playfulness of the images and texts abstracted from their original context, as well as the contrast between the real threats posed to those living in war zones and the cool appreciation of media consumers watching the events on TV and in newspapers, have made the work incongruously funny and uncanny. The public find themselves in an amusing but somehow uneasy and anxious position. Again, through producing this kind of ironic tragicomedy, Chen Shaoxiong manages to mobilize the public via their interactions with images and texts, and to intimately negotiate the political issues related to their urban environments, the spaces of today s global conflicts. In this series of works, Chen Shaoxiong purportedly reintroduces painting, a traditional and popular art form, as if it could more directly and effectively communicate with the general public. However, just like his resort to ink painting for his animation videos, his use of painting the traditional medium is never simply a return to the past. Instead, it is back to the future by blending it with all kinds of new media and experimental languages including video, computer animation and projection. He brings the experiment to an even more open and innovative field: public participation. In his recent painting series Collective Memory Cityscapes, he invites students and members of the general public to reproduce famous urbanscapes in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other major Chinese cities using their thumbs and paint. The selections of the sites are systematically related to the political and economic landmarks utilized by the state propaganda machine as symbols of China s glorious history and revolutionary success. Typically, they include Tian an Men Square and the Great Wall in Beijing, Oriental Pearl Tower and People s Park in Shanghai, Haizhu Square, Sun Yat-Sen Memorial in Guangzhou and the Potala Palace in Lhasa. These landmarks are frequently employed by the mass media to form the official image of China, and hence its official identity. Obviously, as the most viewed photographic images in Chinese society, they have the strongest impacts on Chinese people s memories and imaginations of their country. Calling on untrained individuals to reproduce them on canvas with their thumbs is clearly an attempt to test their faculties of memory. It s also an examination of how propaganda systems have affected the private worlds of these individuals. Every single work is to be formed by thousands of thumb prints of tens of people. This collective participation, on the one hand, re-appropriates the strategy of social mobilization of the propaganda machine that imposes a collective identity over individuals. On the other, it ends up distorting the images. The impossibility of perfectly reconstructing the memorized images both individually and collectively reveals the real nature of political mobilization itself: it is a permanent struggle between the official ideology and individual resistance, between political correctness and personal deviation. Chen Shaoxiong also states that the aim of using thousands of thumb prints of the public to reproduce the images is to match physically, analogically, the surface of digital photography so popular today. It represents democratization of image culture and intellectual production: This is to return digital photos to pixels of various sizes. They are results of collaborations of the people who have lived in the areas depicted in the landscape paintings. Human finger prints replace the chemicals for photo processing. It s a technique situated between a photography darkroom and painting production. It s a collective s remembering of its living space. Today, the change of environment happens faster than human memory s regression. 10 If Andy Warhol s paint-by-numbers proposal in his Do It Yourself (Landscape) (1962) has revealed a fundamental shift in the nature of artistic production at the peak of consumerist society, Chen Shaoxiong s call for collective participation to reproduce the cityscapes by memory and by thumbs follow a similar logic. What is really significant here is that the original meaning of digital print is actually fingerprint the oldest system of identity check and control! Somehow, one can start questioning the artist s real intention: perhaps his ultimate aim is to use a very simple method to subvert the politically and technologically sophisticated established system of contemporary image production in the age of digital technology so crucial for identity and social control. Private Diplomacy At the same time, mobilizations of collective collaboration, such as those in which Chen Shaoxiong engages, imply a process of community building and enhancement of bottomup social initiatives that critically reexamine cultural and political realities. In a time of globalization, it is unavoidable that these efforts should be extended beyond national boundaries to a new geographic and cultural dimension. Transnational collaboration is a natural form of artistic production

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22 today. Chen Shaoxiong understands this, and increasingly makes it a new focus of his work. Interestingly, like his approach to the city that always stems from his immediate experiences, his transnational collaboration also begins with his closest neighbors. Since 2005, he has developed various projects in collaboration with the Japanese artist Tsuyoshi Ozawa and the Korean artist Gimhongsok. As a Chinese artist actively engaged with both Asian and global art scenes, Chen Shaoxiong has found friends abroad with whom he can share common interests and pleasures. Since 2005, he has collaborated with Ozawa, an artist with a history of focusing on creating dialogue and exchange with others, calling his art sodan (dialogue in Japanese). Together they developed a series of projects titled Guangdong- Tokyo. Referring to the ancient Chinese literati game Qushui Liushang (floating the wine glass to be shared by all friends along a twisted brook), both artists produced ink paintings to record their everyday experiences and visions in continuous dialogues. The paintings were then delivered between Guangdong and Tokyo by international express mail and gathered to be shown in various venues. This collaboration has later developed into other forms such as performance, installation and so on. What is even more radical is that Chen and Ozawa have managed to involve their respective families in the artistic process, and have coordinated their meetings regularly as art events. In the summer of 2006, the two families gathered in Beijing for 20 days in the name of their Summer Holiday. Together, the parents and two daughters lived between the city and the gallery space of Boers-Li Gallery. Each day, they came up with new ideas and made objects to reflect and record the process. All forms of everyday life, from eating, playing and working to sleeping, were materialized in various objects and performance events. The public was also invited to join in and share the process. Trans-regional/national dialogues and collaborations are an increasingly important field that more and more artists are devoted to exploring. These explorations can allow them more openness and freedom to venture into new forms of creation. More significantly, these practices are also an ideal way to respond to and participate in the making of new individual and collective identities in the age of globalization. These identities are founded on a novel, process-oriented perspective prompted by confrontation, dialogue, exchange and interaction between individuals from diverse backgrounds. New forms of living and thinking hence creating are based on the dynamics of a global multitude that surpasses the established static and highly conservative concepts of nation-state, national and ethnic identity and historicity that have been largely integrated into and manipulated by the dominant power systems. Developing transnational collaborations while breaking down the boundaries between nations and deconstructing the notion of identity based on nationality implies a subversive challenge to all kinds of modern power systems that tend to systematically turn all transnational cultural and artistic exchanges into interstate diplomacy. What is even more interesting is that more and more efficient transnational collaborations are being carried out at personal, private and societal levels in a doit-yourself manner, rather than being organized by any nation-state officialdom. This creates a more effective structure or channel for global exchange, and a model of globalization that respects individual freedom, cultural diversity and difference. This generates a new global structure of cultural and even political dialogue, coexistence and exchange based on proximities between individuals who form up the multitude rather than traditional groupings conditioned by notions of the people or the masses, which have been so exploited, exhausted and utilized by dominant power systems.11 Ultimately, in this new world of proximity nurtured and formatted by innovative explorations of everyday life experiences, the quotidian, as Michel de Certeau emphasized, produces a completely fresh geopolitical situation that is fluid, complex, cellular, ever-mutating, and therefore constantly creative. According to Arjun Appadurai, this is a major strategy and world vision developed by all kinds of resistant forces (including those generally termed terrorists ) against imperial dominance and the modern world order ruled by liberal capitalism. It can also be explored and utilized by populations who are calling for real freedom and struggling to construct a grassroots globalization project and initiate bottom-up cellular democracy. 12 Obviously, Chen Shaoxiong and Tsuyoshi Ozawa have captured such political implications in the making of their realm of proximate collaboration. They understand that, by dissolving political discourses into everyday parole, they can create a freer and much more flexible space to re-examine and redefine crucial notions, interpretations and significances of historical and contemporary events. In their collaborative projects, just as Chen Shaoxiong did with his Anti-Terrorism Variety, the artists reintroduce discussions on historical entanglements between China and Japan and attempt to propose their own, individual and down-to-earth comprehension. They have explored the different terminologies and definitions of the same events and dates in the complicated history of Sino-Japanese relations and exposed contradictions to public view by simply exhibiting everyday objects in a neutral way. For example, in the Summer Holiday project, cardboard boxes are covered with dates of events related to the war, conflict and reconciliation between both countries written in black, white and red colors to represent their differing significance for the people of both countries in order to reveal how they have been educated or

23 后记 [1] 为什么我要拍摄广州街景?, 陈劭雄, [2] 旅游者的再生时代,Boris Groys,Art Power,MIT 出版,2008,P105 [3] 旅游者的再生时代,Boris Groys,Art Power,MIT 出版,2008,P105 [4] 三种媒介之间: 陈劭雄对 < 墨水城市 > 的自述, 陈劭雄, [5] 三种媒介之间: 陈劭雄对 < 墨水城市 > 的自述, 陈劭雄, [6] < 花样反恐 > 陈劭雄答胡昉的提问, [7] 花样反恐, 陈劭雄, [8] < 花样反恐 > 陈劭雄答胡昉的提问, [9] < 花样反恐 > 陈劭雄答胡昉的提问, [10] 集体记忆 城市风景, 陈劭雄,2006, [11] 群体: 帝国时代的战争与民主,Michael Hardt,Antonio Negri,2004, 企鹅出版社 [12] 小众的恐惧 一篇关于地理愤怒的文章,Arjun Appadurai,2006, 杜克大学出版社

24 brainwashed to hold opposing views by their own authorities. The artists objective exposure of the events and dates, and their independent interpretations, differing from each other according to their own experiences, educations and perspectives, could be considered mistaken, irrelevant or even illegal by the official ideological machines and public opinion. But nevertheless, the artists have come up with totally free and alternative versions of history. Indeed, what is really manifested here is that the artists have intelligently proven that alternative views on history and political discourses, or alternative histories, are not only possible, but also necessary. In this specific case, it s also an alternative form of diplomacy private diplomacy. It s the very guarantee of the possibility of a grassroots and cellular democracy. By nature, transnational collaboration in art always contains a utopian dimension working beyond individual self-expression always demands an idealist common ground. And this is often the most political dimension of the work itself. Chen Shaoxiong and Tsuyoshi Ozawa have hence pushed their collaborations further to develop their alternative readings of history and reality towards a truly imaginative and utopian perspective. To make things even more open, they have invited their Korean friend Gimhongsok, a wonderful artist from the same generation, to join their adventure. Extending their humorous and ironic exploration of the historically problematic relationship between China and Japan in the project Guangdong- Tokyo, they, on the one hand, implicate a third persona, a Korean, to further complicate this relationship Korea has for centuries been a bargaining chip between these two Asian superpowers. On the other hand, they bring the adventure retrospectively towards an unknown, fictive and utopian direction. The three artists have decided to work on a longterm project to excavate and reconstruct a fictive capital city for the three countries: Xijing, the Western Capital, which is both the ancestor and future heritage of the current capitals called Tokyo (the Eastern Capital) Beijing (the Northern Capital), etc. Over the last few years, the artists have created their own version of Xijing through mock research, investigation, and interviews and brought the results together as a unified installation to prove the existence of such a lost paradise the very root of the common prosperity and troubles shared by the three nations. They call themselves Xijing Men. Their efforts not only suggest an alternative reading of the historic past, but also bring the artists to confront the current reality, especially urgent social, political and cultural issues. In 2008, when China held the Olympic Games in Beijing and boasted its great success as a new superpower, the Xijing Men decided to mount their own Olympic Games. Of course, they took place in Xijing! The events were held in the most unlikely sites such as family homes, hotels, and galleries, while the only athletes were the artists and the audience simply their family members. Mimicking the serious official games in a most comic and funny way, their games were totally ironic and ridiculous If the official Olympic Games represent a national and political utopia of becoming a global superpower and a heavyweight in international diplomacy in the most impeccable, rigid and solemn manner, then the Xijing Men s private games represent exactly the opposite: free, playful, uncontrolled, full of failures and laughter. If the utopian project of the official Games is ultimately to gain superior and oppressive powers over the world, the Xijing Olympics are precisely its parody and derision. It is a private diplomacy that voices the claims of the bottom of a society striving for its own way of being. They are definitely much more open, free, energetic and vivid, and much closer to people s hearts. Private Diplomacy When I was finishing this text, a last minute shocking event happened: in the late evening of 8 February 2009, the night of the traditional Chinese Lantern Festival, TVCC (an inverse image of the new CCTV headquarters, also designed by Rem Koolhaas OMA), one of the most spectacular edifices in Beijing freshly constructed to celebrate the Olympics and the new success of the city as a new global centre, was almost entirely burnt by a simple firework for the lantern festival celebration! The images on the TV are terribly overwhelming, almost comparable to the twin-towers on fire on 9/11, What s even more stunning is that the fireworks used on the occasion, according to the official media, are exactly the same type as those used for the opening spectacle of the Beijing Olympics a few months ago! Is there a kind of destiny out there? After Anti-Terrorism Variety, should Chen Shaoxiong now design a new type of anti-fire high rise building? San Francisco, 10 February 2009

25 1 Chen Shaoxiong, Why do I photograph street views in Guangzhou? on 2 Boris Groys, The Age of Touristic Reproduction, in Art Power, MIT Pess, 2008, p Ibid, pp Chen Shaoxiong: Among Three Media words on Ink City by Chen Shaoxiong, on 5 Ibid. 6 Chen Shaoxiong, interviewed by Hu Fang, Variety of Anti-Terrorism, on 7 Chen Shaoxiong, Anti-Terrorism Variety, on www. chenshaoxiong.com 8 Chen Shaoxiong, interviewed by Hu Fang, Variety of Anti-Terrorism, on 9 Ibid. 10 Chen Shaoxiong, Collective Memory Cityscapes, 2006, on 11 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, 2004, Penguin 12 Arjun Appadurai: Fear of Small Numbers, an essay on the geography of anger. 2006, Duke University Press

26

27 行为 performance 装置 installation 录像 video 录像装置 video installation 动画 animation 摄影 photography 摄影装置 photo installation 绘画 painting 雕塑 sculpture 合作 collaboration

28 时间之外的时间 Time after Time A Dialogue between Chen Shaoxiong and Pauline J. Yao 姚嘉善 : 陈劭雄 : PY: I d like to start by asking about your earlier works. I am curious as to why all of your earlier artworks contain timeframes and numbers in the titles, such as Seven Days, 72.5 Hours and Five Hours. Why choose these specific lengths of time? CSX: Those specific numbers are the lengths of time during which those pieces existed, and are objectively measurable amounts of time. Like Five Hours, that was a performance at the entrance to a bar, and the bar owner could only tolerate me being there for five hours. But then the police interfered, and the work only existed for two and a half hours. All of my works from 1991 to 1993 are titled after units of time. At that time social life was very disappointing, and I wanted to take the concept of reality out of temporality through my work. But really, what I wanted to express was a kind of temporality outside of time. 七天的沉寂 Seven Days Silence 广州第一工人文化宫 Guangzhou No.1 Workers Palace, Guangzhou

29 1991

30 姚嘉善 : 陈劭雄 : PY: If these works represent time outside of time, then do they also on some level function as artworks outside of art? In other words, at that time, how were you defining art? CSX: There was a period of time when I was very interested in this question, What is art?, when I was very doubtful about the established definition. At that time saying something looked like art was just another way of saying I despised it. On the other hand, I ve always felt that this activity of definition is like an assigned topic, in that it can be directed toward any particular attribute. 耗电七十二个半小时 72.5 Hours of Electricity Consumption 1000 X 1000 X 300 cm 姚嘉善 : 陈劭雄 : PY: Movements like happenings and Fluxus also addressed these ideas, the boundaries between art and life or the definition of art. They also produced works with deep relationships to time. How did you respond to these movements? CSX: At that time I was very interested in the idea of happenings, but I don t think I shared the desire of those artists to create a theatrical relationship with a nonart audience. I want my result to be a nothing-happening, devoid of content, independent, just empty time. I see the Fluxus artists as a complementary inverse of my work. One of them, Ben Vautier, thought that art was like dogs marking their territory by urinating over something, and I think this idea is almost coincidentally related to my desire to cut the connections between time and reality. And John Cage s meaningless games were very influential for my work at that time.

31 五小时 Five Hours 广州红蚂蚁酒吧 Red Ants Bar, Guangzhou

32 姚嘉善 : 改变电视频道使改变新娘的决定 Change the TV Channel, Change the Bride s Decision 综合材料 Various materials 80X 60 X180 cm 陈劭雄 : PY: How would you relate these influences to the particular context you were facing at that time? CSX: It allowed me to effectively escape a lot of practical questions. 姚嘉善 : 陈劭雄 : PY: I suppose I am thinking of the context of China during the 1990s, in which time became fractured, sped up, and multiplied as a result of changes in the urban environment. Is this related to why you chose to deal with time in your art? CSX: Yes, living in Guangzhou in the 1990s it was possible to sense drastic changes in our social environment wrought by the process of urbanization at every minute of every day. But in terms of time, my feelings come more from memory. The changes in the structure of Chinese society have also been accompanied by a shift in value systems. In our middle school textbooks we had Mao Zedong s political theory of three worlds, but then after graduating from college we had Karl Popper s concept of World 3. These two totally opposed worldviews make up a classic example of the confusion of theories and values we were facing at that time. It s like taking all of these things mixed up in memory the Cultural Revolution, the educated youth, economic reform and opening and putting them all together in a short period of time but with the narrative destroyed, just like a movie preview. Albert Einstein made us see the relativity of space, but that era made us sense the indeterminacy of time.